Search Results

“... at one another head down, sometimes for months on end. At the time of writing, Craig Raine and Tom Paulin are still colliding in a dispute which began over a small failure to recognise a quotation and an even smaller disagreement over whether a spondee can be made to rhyme oxytonically with an iamb. The clash would be from Laputa, not to say ...”

“... Fenton writes, and that is also written, in their various ways, by Fuller, by Michael Hofmann, Tom Paulin, Christopher Reid and others. Certainly the romantic rhetoric that is second nature to Larkin, as to Auden, Yeats and Eliot, has no place in their poetic repertoire. It once seemed so ‘natural’, but beside their literariness and air of ...”

“... the measure of, weighs up, the violent evasions and stock affronts of the oligarchy of fraud.’ Tom Paulin once wrote in these pages a brilliantly intemperate account of ‘Hill’s conservative imagination’ (4 April 1985), sparking a long correspondence of attack and counterattack; but it no longer seems obvious that that is quite what his ...”

“... to those assumptions about such labourers he had earlier criticised. This in its turn explains why Tom Paulin – never one to leave a brick unthrown – said I had got the poem ‘wrong’, which at the time I took to be perverse but now see the point of. Since only a few Hardy scholars would be aware of this reading of the poem I’m happy I didn’t ...”

“... evidence of renewed attention. The range of his living admirers is noteworthy – Craig Raine, Tom Paulin, Edward Said (who, not long ago, confessed in these pages to the sort of bilingualism that was nascent in Kipling: ‘Every time I speak an English sentence, I find myself echoing it in Arabic; and vice versa’) – but the range of their ...”

“... poem about privacy, ‘The Garden’, which supplied Lowell’s stanza form. And it is present in Tom Moore’s ode ‘To the Flying-Fish’, which longs to ‘cast every lingering stain away’ and to climb to a ‘purer air’. ‘Let not my spirit’s flight be weak,’ pants Moore, known to the world as the poet of an amorous love. We discover that Lowell ...”

“... an instrument for national contestation, as it is for John Clare and Ted Hughes. Critics such as Tom Paulin and Mina Gorji have drawn our attention to the ways in which nature becomes a metaphor for an embattled Englishness in Clare and Hughes; the unfinished ‘naturalness’ of nature is conflated with the ‘rude’ qualities of English dialect or ...”

“... both the damage and the music of the world. A woman in Belfast in one of the finest poems in Tom Paulin’s Invasion Handbookhands her dream onto her eldest sonwho wonders if mere dreamscan weigh in the recordor for that matter can poems?Both poems and dreams, lyric poems and mere dreams, can weigh in the record – if we are lucky they are the ...”